WHEN my husband was a boy in the working class city of Chester, Pa., he was in the choir at St. Michael’s School. During Holy Week, the choir would sing, among other things, Giovanni da Palestrina’s Adoramus te, Christe, a choral version of the Latin prayer recited during the Stations of the Cross. St. Michael’s didn’t have many of the frills schools have today and my husband led a rough-and-tumble life with his friends on the streets, but he encountered one vital thing there: beauty.

Children need beauty. Even though they can’t fully understand it, beauty seeps into their souls and finds a permanent home there. It gives them a taste for the truth and the love that underlies all things.

Adoramus te, Christe
Et benedicimus tibi
quia per sanctam crucem tuam
redemisti mundum.
Qui passus es pro nobis,
Domine, Domine, miserere nobis. (more…)

FRANCIS passes up the opportunity to explain Catholic reverence for the body. (more…)

ALAN writes:

One day I was reading about people’s memories of growing up in a certain neighborhood. One woman remembered:

“How friendly people were, and how open everything was. People left their doors unlocked. One lady who lived in a big white house put on a scary costume and handed out candy to children who came to her door on Halloween. It was all very friendly. In front of another house, children had a lemonade stand.” Are these the memories of the fictitious town in “Leave It To Beaver?” No, but they could be. Are they the memories of the place where I lived in boyhood? They might be, but they aren’t. They are the memories of people who grew up on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills in the 1940s-‘50s.

They are the memories of people like Joan Benny, Jack Benny’s adopted daughter. They lived at 1002 North Roxbury Drive. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz lived next door, and it was she who handed out the candy. Other neighbors included James Stewart and Rosemary Clooney. [See Todd Purdum’s “The Street Where They Lived,” Vanity Fair, April 1999]

Much of America was like that at one time. Police officers who grew up in the same neighborhoods of St. Louis where I did remember many residents leaving their doors unlocked. That, of course, was at a time before the Communist-engineered destruction of city neighborhoods and strong Catholic parishes. (more…)

NICK writes:

Just a thought on your article this morning: should we grant the assumption that beta males are in fact inferior to alpha males?

I don’t like these descriptions, because they seem too grounded in a more animalistic reality but, as you point out, it is a popular theme on the American political Right of today.

Alpha males are typically rugged men who have no serious allegiance or loyalty to anyone else. They don’t typically like order, law or responsibility. They operate on a “dog eat dog” mentality and usually are very opportunistic in the pursuit of their own self-defined concept of happiness. In their ethical lives, they’re utilitarian.

Great examples of Alpha males: dead-beat fathers, drug dealers, playboys, wall-street investors, politicians, lawyers, etc.

None of these are typically exemplars of a good life, except when “good life” is defined by modern standards. People who boldly lived their lives as they saw fit to do so regardless of any of the supposed expectations rooted in their nature as men (similarly, women are “empowered” and “free” when they live like their lives like this). (more…)

SEE Jim Fetzer's listing of "ten reasons for concluding that the Parkland Shooting was a staged event, planned long in advance, which included the use of student 'crisis actors' faking wounds they did not incur and even teachers and doctors making false claims about the death of a fellow teacher (who was no longer at the school) and about wounds that healed in record time (in violation of the laws of physiology and medicine). ”

  DREW EMMONS describes his journey from life as a Protestant pastor to the Vatican II religion to the true Catholic Church.

“The Ultimate Deep State goal is worldwide Totalitarianism/Socialism but they need to do a few things first:

1. Take away our guns so we can’t resist their abuse.

2. Destroy the American economy to get us to agree to Socialism.

3. Destroy the family unit/institution.”

Source (more…)

OUR SINGING STRENGTH
— Robert Frost

It snowed in spring on earth so dry and warm
The flakes could find no landing place to form.
Hordes spent themselves to make it wet and cold,
And still they failed of any lasting hold.
They made no white impression on the black.
They disappeared as if earth sent them back.
Not till from separate flakes they changed at night
To almost strips and tapes of ragged white
Did grass and garden ground confess it snowed,
And all go back to winter but the road.
Next day the scene was piled and puffed and dead.
The grass lay flattened under one great tread.
Borne down until the end almost took root,
The rangey bough anticipated fruit
With snowball cupped in every opening bud.
The road alone maintained itself in mud,
Whatever its secret was of greater heat
From inward fires or brush of passing feet. (more…)

"IF ONLY I had gotten my hands on your mother." (Warning: Sickening. Not for the sensitive.)

Source

"WE are passengers, careening toward the next world war and with it financial ruin by the destruction of our money. We are now witnessing almost daily threats, back and forth between our government and Russia.  It is up to God’s natural peacemakers to demand an end to wars, and to take over the war ship we ride on. Only leadership is needed, and [we] cannot provide it!" --- Charles Coulson, We Hold These Truths

“IN a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time. As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.”

– Aldous Huxley, in the foreword to ”Brave New World” (more…)

FROM a piece by Bernie Suarez on seven major drawbacks of cell phones: We’ve all likely seen the destruction of the person-to-person interpersonal relationship at the hands of the cell phone. No longer do people want to meet in person, instead they would rather text you. Even speaking on the phone is out of style for many younger adults. The hassle of actually having to speak to you on the phone is too much to ask for, thus a text which is exponentially less personal is more convenient for them. For some people texting allows them to more easily ignore you, put you off until later and worse. All of this I firmly believe was by design. The globalists wanted an isolated and callous humanity hooked on electronics and depleted of real human interaction, and the cell phone gave them the perfect tool to advance this idea. It doesn't matter whether it was by design or not.  It's a great technological leap in some ways,  but cell phones affect society and human health. A friend of mine is a philosophy professor who recently asked his students why they prefer to text friends instead of calling them. The students all agreed that a phone call presented the possibility of rejection. The phone call was too personal. With texting, friends can ignore or evade requests to get together. Cell phones make it harder to deal with normal interactions. They are hypnotic, addictive and, as Suarez…

  DR. E. MICHAEL JONES, in this interview with Vendée Radio, discusses the history of American conservatism, a managed movement started after Pearl Harbor, when the "America First" movement was deliberately killed by forces within the American and British governments. Don't miss this interview, which includes discussion of Catholic economic teaching. Along the way, Jones discusses many familiar names, including Richard Neuhaus, William Buckley, Russell Kirk, Thomas Fleming and Jordan Peterson. (Please disregard the part on Vatican II.)

WHITNEY WEBB reports on the largest joint air defense exercise of U.S. and Israeli forces, a drill for conflict on three fronts: Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. (more…)

THE editor of National Geographic magazine, Susan Goldberg, apologizes for the racist opinions of her predecessors in the latest issue.

I’m the tenth editor of National Geographic since its founding in 1888. I’m the first woman and the first Jewish person—a member of two groups that also once faced discrimination here. It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine’s past.

Aside from the substance — or lack of substance — of Ms. Goldberg’s apology, it’s an odd thing for an editor to do. Editors don’t normally seek to denigrate their publications in public.

It seems that it is Ms. Goldberg who is the bigot.

Would the magazine of WASP racists fascinated by exotic cultures in far-off lands (though they did feature too many pictures of naked women — just like the mainstream media today) have ever so undercut the confidence of native, non-white cultures by portraying their children in sexual confusion (see below)? (Sorry, previous link was a fake.) I think not. I would wager that no previous editor of National Geographic has had anything remotely like the political agenda of Susan Goldberg and her backers in the entertainment industry, of which National Geographic is now a part. (more…)